A Dress-Up Rager With Eckhaus Latta, Ottolinger, and Made

As fashion skews ever safer, ever more commercial, it’s easy to slip into a kind of jaded surfeit. And then sometimes you find yourself partying in an abandoned carpet factory in Berlin, and all that fades away for a minute. Such was the case last night as Made staged an intercontinental creative happening, which doubled as a boozy, smoky sendoff for the city’s fashion week. Just a couple of weeks ago, Made set up shop at L.A. Live, shifting the fashion show paradigm by offering the public the chance to attend a Moschino runway show, or bear witness to Hood By Air’s experiential presentation. The latest way the creative powerhouse is moving the needle in the industry? In Berlin on Friday, Made tapped a pair of idiosyncratic talents from both sides of the Atlantic; hometown heroes Ottolinger, and directional New York-slash-Los Angeles label Eckhaus Latta. The exchange program was masterminded by Barnett Zitron, Made’s managing director: “We realized something we could offer Berlin designers was a spot to show in New York,” he tells Vogue.com. To wit, Ottolinger will present on the Made New York roster for Spring and Fall 2017, and Eckhaus Latta flew to Berlin to stage Friday’s festivities (Zitron notes EL’s enthusiastic following among the city’s arty coterie). For Made, it’s another way to extend its resources and considerable clout to young brands; adds Zitron: “Our voice is the designers.”

Hosted at the aforementioned carpet factory-cum-events space, Alte Teppichfabrik Berlin, the evening kicked off with a dinner designed by Ottolinger’s Christa Bösch and Cosima Gadient. Their process-oriented stripe of deconstruction came to life in the space, writ large: Diaphanous swells of plastic hung down the walls and pooled on the floor. Guests found their seats thanks to napkins handily painted with their names, and dry ice poured waves of smoke off of massive silver tureens of oysters. The tablecloths seemed at first to have fallen victim to a run-in with candles, but on closer inspection, they were covered with the same artfully burned holes which dapple many of Ottolinger’s garments (more than a handful of attendees were sporting the punkish, beautifully undone, singed styles).

After dinner, guests made their way down to the ground floor where the EL takeover was in full effect. Designers Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta had strung the otherwise empty space with zigzagging laundry lines, decked out not with their own creations, but somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 pounds of secondhand clothing, all free for the trying on and taking home. With what Eckhaus dubbed, “a hanging thrift store,” the pair struck on an ingeniously interactive concept: booze + free clothes = instant, remarkably childlike joy. The pieces, all curated with a thumbs up—thumbs down vote, were sourced from Humana Secondhand & Vintage, which the designers likened to Berlin’s Salvation Army, and a German vintage picker who sorts literal tons upon tons every single day. “The life cycle of clothing is really to important to us, so it’s fun for us to play with that,” Eckhaus offered—as the label does in its own collections, repurposing all manner of dead stock.

The business of “the schmatte guy,” as Latta dubbed their connection (referencing the Yiddish word for rags), embodies a way of looking at clothes that’s totally foreign to quote-unquote high fashion; it’s about thinking of clothing in bulk, stripping away any pretense of preciousness and embracing garments as the functional items which they are. It’s not about A Look, it’s about a pound of shirts, or 2,000 of denim. The arm’s-length remove of the runway format gone, these pieces weren't placed on a pedestal of any sort. With party vibes in full force, the experiment lent a whole new meaning to the words “ready-to-wear”—emphasis on ready, and ready right now. Attendees gamely pulled jackets and tops from the lines, stripping down and enlisting their friends to cinch up deliciously tatty satin corsets. A Burberry blazer hung alongside stretchy ’90s bubble tops, all of it treated equally.

“I grew up near this Goodwill distribution center where everything was a dollar a pound,” Latta recalls, “so you never had to worry about how much anything cost. You could get anything you wanted if it was worth it to you to carry it. This is kind of the same thing on a larger scale. It’s been garbage to someone, and treasure to us.” Treasure to Eckhaus and Latta, sure, and even moreso to their guests.

The concept for last night’s event was an extension of “E.L. international fashion weeks,” impromptu “shows” which Eckhaus and Latta stage with friends on their personal Instagrams in various cities around the world. Revelers were encouraged to stage a runway show, and stage they did; in typically nocturnal Berlin fashion, things heated up well after 1 a.m.

For all the myriad words in the German language to describe hyper-specific phenomena and states of being, the designers found that the meaning of Friday night’s event couldn’t make it entirely across the language barrier. “[The phrase] ‘playing dress-up’ does not translate in German,” Latta says. Something about the element of loose playfulness and experimentation kept getting lost—lost in translation, maybe, but surely not lacking last night.